ICL LAUNCHES OFFICEPOWER FOR SANTA CRUZ UNIX MACHINES

ICL Plc has been dallying with the prospect of putting its OfficePower office automation suite up on alien systems for at least two years (CI No 1,410). Now it has finally taken to the field and just about touched first base, announcing that OfficePower is from today, generally available worldwide on Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s […]

ICL Plc has been dallying with the prospect of putting its OfficePower office automation suite up on alien systems for at least two years (CI No 1,410). Now it has finally taken to the field and just about touched first base, announcing that OfficePower is from today, generally available worldwide on Santa Cruz Operation Inc’s Unix implementation. As expected (CI No 1,918), the two other Unix environments for which it will market OfficePower are Sun Microsystems Inc Sparcstations running SunOs 4.1.2, which is scheduled to ship at the end of June and IBM Corp’s RS/6000 AIX systems, which version, ICL says, will arrive at the end of September. It’s a cultural move, according to Graham Taylor, ICL’s UK software business manager, to break into the clientserver open systems market. Apparently IBM, which offers the AP/6000 office package on the RS/6000, is not at all perturbed about ICL muscling into its ter-ritory with OfficePower. Aiming at corporate accounts, ICL claims these versions of OfficePower, along with versions for other Unix variants expected to be announced over the coming months, will account for over 70% of new licences for the software by the end of 1993, by its reckoning some 140,000 out of 200,000 new seats it expects to win between now and then. Despite its good intentions, however, ICL is only able to de-liver, at present, a Santa Cruz implementation running under Powerwindows – a Microsoft Corp MS-Windows based graphical user interface. X.400 mail, Novell Inc NetWare local area networking, Powersearch version 3, Powerlink, all server software as well as an application programming in-terface, API, toolkit called Powerkit – are all included. However, the new versions do not support the de facto OSF/Motif graphical user interface standard – though the Sun version does support Open Look – and Mot-if support may not even feature by the time the RS/6000 version is deli-vered, though ICL says it is working on it. The API toolkit, developed for Unix-based applications, will enable existing applications to be front-ended with a traditional OfficePower look and feel. OfficePower for Unix currently supports only ICL’s long time relational partner Ing-res Corp’s database, though there are plans to bring the Oracle Corp of-fering into play, and ICL confirms that it is talking to other companies too. Sales will be direct and via existing third-party distributors.